Quotes About Restorative justice

That was the thing about restorative justice. It allowed you to hold two things in your head at the same time--that butt-slapping was funny, and also that it wasn't. That asking permission to touch somebody was funny, but that you really didn't want to be touched by somebody who didn't ask. That the girls wanted Jeff to dial back the ass-smacking thing, but that they still liked joking around with him. That the whole thing wasn't a big deal, and that it kind of was (239).

Restorative justice is more interested in relationships. A crime is not act against a rule, it's an act against a person. When you harm somebody, you owe it to them to make things right. By making things right, you begin to heal your relationship with the community. Our system is focused on blame and punishment and not on healing and learning. - Lauren Abramson (RJ Program in Baltimore, MD)

Our system is focused on blame and punishment and not on healing and learning

RJ advocates say, is not an act against a rule, it's an act against a person. When you harm somebody, you owe it to them to make things right. By making things right, you begin to heal your relationship with the community.

Restorative Justice} allowed you two hold two things in your head at the same time...that's what community was, all those layers of understanding.

Seek to make a person blush for their guilt rather than shed their blood.

justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them.

In a nation that likes to see itself as forgiving, we are mulishly unforgiving of those who have committed a felony...

All over the world, social innovation is tackling some of the most pressing problems facing society today - from fair trade, distance learning, hospices, urban farming and waste reduction to restorative justice and zero-carbon housing. But most of these are growing despite, not because of, help from governments.

It's time for Christianity to rediscover the deeper biblical theme of restorative justice, which focuses on rehabilitation and reconciliation, not punishment.

Once a person recognizes that Jesus's mission (obvious in all four Gospels) was to heal people, not punish them, the dominant theories of retributive justice begin to lose their appeal and their authority.

That as long as we keep God imprisoned in a retributive frame instead of a restorative frame, we really have no substantial good news;

Which of us does not admire what Lycurgus the Spartan did? A young citizen had put out his eye, and been handed over to him by the people to be punished at his own discretion. Lycurgus abstained from all vengeance, but on the contrary instructed and made a good man of him. Producing him in public in the theatre, he said to the astonished Spartans: I received this young man at your hands full of violence and wanton insolence; I restore him to you in his right mind and fit to serve his country.

It's hard work to ensure that all schools are safe and welcoming places for all children. It means changing policies, practices and cultures; providing school support personnel; and funding programs like restorative justice - not simply resorting to excessive and often discriminatory discipline.

But to punish and not to restore, that is the greatest of all offences.

When people have been hurt over and over, and rather than compassion or understanding you're given lectures about how it's really all your fault and that no one needs to make amends, you can lose your mind.

The person who has been convicted has served their time. Why would we continue to punish and exclude them from housing and jobs? Those are the primary areas that allow people to get their lives back on track.

God's justice, as Desmond Tutu insisted, is not retributive but restorative.64 It is natural that many do not understand this, because "God's love, resisted, is felt as wrath.

To destroy an offender cannot benefit society so much as to redeem him. (The Flying Girl, 1911)

I think in the end, God's justice is redemptive, it's restorative, it's about giving life, not taking life.

I'm not one who thinks that people should be locked up and thrown away the key.

Mass incarceration and its never-ending human toll will be with us until we come to see that no crime justifies permanent civic death.

Jewish law is concerned not only with protecting the rights of those who have been wronged, but also helping wrongdoers rebuild their future. Guilt, in Judaism, is about acts, not persons. It is the act, not the person, that is condemned.

At the federal level, I believe we should address inequality by reforming our criminal justice system and providing restorative justice to communities devastated by the enforcement of discriminatory laws.